Aztec Labs has acquired Obsidion, the company behind the open-source, privacy-preserving identity verification tool ZKPassport.
The Obsidion team, including co-founders Michael Elliot and Theo Madzou, will join Aztec Labs to continue developing ZKPassport and contribute to additional products. Other aspects of the deal were undisclosed.
In December, Aztec raised some $60 million worth of ETH through its AZTEC token sale, extending its runway after raising about $125 million in previous venture capital funding from notable investors like a16z, Paradigm, and Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin.
The move comes amid a wave of consolidation in the crypto industry. Some well-established firms have been scooped up by legacy institutions, like Deloitte's recent acquisition of Blocknative, while other projects that have more recently raised funds expand through buyouts. With crypto markets on somewhat unstable footing, some projects have also elected to shut down, often citing revenue concerns, or reduce their headcount.
Aztec Labs is developing an eponymous privacy-preserving, decentralized Layer 2 zk-rollup on Ethereum. The Aztec Network aims to provide programmable privacy for smart contracts, enabling developers to build hybrid applications that reveal some information while shielding some data, user identities, and even computation from public view.
